


In Sickness

by JustAnotherGhostwriter



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Sickfic, Vomiting, emeto, stomach flu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 00:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18789412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherGhostwriter/pseuds/JustAnotherGhostwriter
Summary: There's nothing more telling for a budding relationship than how the other reacts when you're sick with something more embarrassing than just a common cold.





	In Sickness

**Author's Note:**

> **No spoilers** , but I was salty about one decision Endgame made. So I'm counteracting those feels by kicking off my Bad Things Happen bingo with these two and h/c fluff. I'm honestly quite proud I managed to keep this relatively short. I'm not very proud that Jack didn't manage to make an appearance. Poor, neglected Jack. 
> 
> [Pop over to Tumblr ](https://justanotherghostwriter.tumblr.com/post/184800439311/justanotherghostwriter-i-signed-up-for-bad)if you wanna give me a prompt for something!

The change in Peggy and Daniel's relationship had been a long time coming, and an incredibly sudden development at the same time. There was, after all, a difference in realising that one man, as clever and attractive as he was, was not right for you romantically and choosing that the other potential romantic interest was someone you _wanted_ to pursue. And that was without even chewing on the giant leap from that mental choice to actually doing something about it. But their kiss had happened – spontaneously, a cumulation of too much missed time and a good period of working together again and re-establishing exactly why she'd missed that man so much when he'd moved to LA. And Peggy could not say, even to herself, where the kiss would have led – awkward conversation or the opposite – had they not been interrupted by the news of Jack's shooting.

  
And after that call that catapulted them into chaos, there was too much tension and fear and anger and plain old, tedious work to keep them occupied at all hours and unable to have any sort of proper talk about what their relationship was and was hopefully evolving into. So they remained what they always had been, but embellished the flavour by allowing their hands to find each other every now and then, by allowing their legs to brush as they sat closer than strictly necessary, allowed looks to linger and touches to the corners of tired eyes, a stray strand of dirty hair, tense shoulders. Peggy allowed him to lend her a coat when they were both out and about in the rain and he allowed her to fetch and carry after nearly twenty-four hours of being awake, when he couldn't rise from where he slumped. The unspoken things hovering over every touch and look and feeling were frightening, but no more so than finding the language to make the implicit explicit.

  
Finally, Jack was out of the ICU and stubbornly crawling his way to a full recovery and they found themselves alone overlooking the bright-lighted city after chasing a cold lead to a broken down warehouse. And, leaning against his car, she asked. Or both of them did in that language of looks and instinct they'd refined while working together, and she put it into English. After an hour of talking and listening, they both agreed to go slow. Because they'd both done the whirlwind rush into romance, caution seemed apt, and not just because their working situation complicated things further. Peggy was sure about Daniel, but she doubted that surety. He admitted to something similar, and in-between the lines of his confession she read how much carrying feelings for her for so much longer than she’d carried some for him had weighed heavy, especially after the initial burns. From there, things progressed naturally – the switch between work professionalism and the warmth of friendship and when to use which had always come startlingly easily, and their cautious tiptoes into dating also did not impede their ability to know what they could show the world when. And they'd already cared about each other to the point of illogical recklessness before that first kiss, so the acknowledgement of such intensity did nothing more than cause an argument or two that always resulted in compromise and deeper understanding of each other.

  
So when one night of trawling through evidence files and reports saw them greet one in the morning seated in his living room and he offered to let her stay over instead of drive back to Howard's in her days-accumulated exhaustion, Peggy felt comfortable enough to accept his answer gratefully and readily. She leaned heavily on her practical nature as she got dressed into the pair of pyjamas Daniel leant her, knowing the soft, slightly worn plaid (that drowned her in a material hug that smelled of his detergent) would be much more comfortable to sleep in than her suit, as stylish as it had been when she’d put it on hours ago. That same practical nature made her narrow in on Daniel’s insistence that he sleep on the sofa while she took the – newly made up, she noticed – bed in his room. But this practicality was something much more delicate to tackle on more levels than one, and her tact was blunt and shaky that early in the morning.

 

“Daniel...” He didn’t stop shaking a blanket over the sofa; didn’t look at her. It _could_ have been her imagination, but she was relatively sure he _was_ blushing. “Daniel, I couldn’t possibly toss you out of your own bed,” she tried, begging her lagging, heavy brain to come up with the right words to solve this problem properly. 

 

“It’s bad manners to make your guests sleep uncomfortably,” he pointed out, and if she didn’t _know_ he would do the same if it were Mr Jarvis or even Jack, if Jack were behaving, then she’d use her gender as the angle to make him back up. 

 

“Yes, but I also decided to stay unexpectedly. And... and I’ve slept on far worse than a nice, warm, soft sofa,” she tried. 

 

“As have I,” he countered, giving her a small smile that would have been as encouraging as he no doubt intended it were it not for his very obvious awkward embarrassment. 

 

“Yes, but...” Peggy struggled for the words, her own embarrassment hot in her gut and warring with her desire to save him from himself. The embarrassment wanted her to back away from this battle, to take the bed and leave the minefield she had no clearance to cross yet, she was sure, well enough alone. But then again, when had backing away from a battle ever been her strong suit? “But that was back when your leg could handle something like a night on an uncomfortable sofa.” 

 

And there it was, out in the open, harsh as an explosion. Daniel paused in his action of laying down a pillow on one end of the couch, his shoulders to her suddenly very tense, and Peggy found she could not draw a proper breath as she waited, suddenly a lot less tired, to survey the damage her flagrant overstepping had just caused. After three loaded moments, Daniel let the pillow drop and then turned to Peggy, his face wary but otherwise carefully, neutrally blank. He was searching her eyes for something, and she searched his for some kind of clue as to how badly she’d insulted or hurt him, and then he took a deliberate breath, relaxed his shoulders in a gesture that was almost natural, and forced a wry smile. 

 

“Well. You’re not wrong. And, uh...” He was struggling with it, but there was that same determined set to his jaw that Peggy knew from work, so she clamped down on her tongue and gave him all the time he needed to speak. “That wouldn’t... Uh... It would be irresponsible to my already short-staffed team and to our current priority investigation for me to be out of commission.” 

 

The desire to blurt out that  _that hadn’t been what she was worried about_ was strong, but Peggy clamped back on that, as well. Not only was she even more unsure about what effect her concern would have at that exact moment – it would be too easy to read it as overbearing pity, she knew – but she was also half convinced that Daniel’s words had been more to firmly remind and convince himself than for her benefit. 

 

So instead she just pursed her lips for a moment and then said, “I can either take the sofa, or we can both take the bed. It’s a double, is it not?” That had the good effect of knocking the complicated storm of emotions out of Daniel’s eyes and replacing it instantly with flabberghasted shock. 

 

“I... _what_?” 

 

“It’s a practical solution,” Peggy said, forcing herself to sound blasé and matter-of-fact, as though the offer hadn’t been blurted out before she’d thought it through. As though she wasn’t desperately trying to force down a blush. “You don’t want me to sleep on the sofa. I don’t want you to sleep on the sofa. The bed is big enough. So...” She waved a hand. 

 

Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. “Peggy...” 

 

“We have both slept in close quarters with other people before,” she said, now needing to fully defend her idea, and warming to it as she found reasons it should be the one followed through on. “I spent many nights being crushed, squashed, snored on and otherwise rolled over by sweaty men, so I assure you that I’m used to it. It will simply be two friends sharing a mattress and some blankets. Nothing more.” 

 

She was the one convincing him, right up until she was already lying down on her side with her back to him and her eyes firmly, pointedly closed while he removed the prosthetic and went through other motions she did not allow herself to even be curious about – that was still not hers to venture into, and every bit of her knew it. There, in the darkness of her own eyelids and the slightly wild beating of her heart for reasons she could not pin on one emotion, Peggy began to have doubts. By the time Daniel wordlessly switched off the light and lay back on the bed behind her, Peggy was so tense she was sure she would get  _no_ sleep that night, despite how tired she was. Time crept by uncomfortably, and she was so lost in her own wildly chasing doubts that it took a while for her to notice that Daniel had not moved a single inch since he’d laid down. 

 

Taking a chance, Peggy slowly pushed herself up onto her elbow and looked over her shoulder. Daniel was lying, arms at his side, stiff as a board. His eyes met hers in the murky half-light of the moon. Peggy snorted, tried to cover it up with her hand, and sent Daniel into sniggers. Once he was softly laughing, she let go of her own laughter – embarrassed, bemused, relieved. 

 

“Does it help if I say that I’ll break your fingers if you try anything with me while I’m asleep?” she ventured, and was rewarded by another chuckle from him. 

 

“Yes. And...” Two beats of hesitation. “I’ll have you know that you’re on the side that can still kick you if you steal my blankets.” 

 

Peggy rolled over a little further so that he could see her grin. “Duly noted.” She flopped back down, burrowing under the covers a little, feeling her muscles unwind. “Goodnight, Daniel.” 

 

“’Night, Peg,” he answered, gently, and she felt him shift into another position himself. 

 

That all meant that Daniel was right beside her when she woke up with bile already in her mouth, and was, unfortunately, caught in the crossfire of her arms as she flailed herself out of his bed and rushed to his en-suit, barely making the toilet bowl in time before she threw up up properly. She could barely hear his sleepy, concerned calls as she heaved, and it was incredibly rude of her given she’d just punched him awake at who-knew-what time and puked a bit down the front of the pyjamas she’d borrowed from him, but Peggy kicked the door to the bathroom shut on his calls and yelled at him, weakly, to please leave her alone. 

 

It was a small mercy that they hadn’t eaten much the day before, because even with her mostly-empty stomach the climax of the nausea lasted for what felt like an age, leaving her dry-heaving as her stomach cramped in waves of agony that harkened back to being impaled. The nausea faded somewhat, but the stomach cramps intensified, and Peggy blearily considered the possibility that she’d been poisoned by whomever had shot Jack to get her to stop looking into his case. She wanted to follow this up with somebody – to tell Daniel, to get to hospital for the antidote – but the effort of getting up or even calling his name was monumental. 

 

And then she tried, and ended up belching so hard she nearly threw up a little again, and she decided, quite firmly, that the bathroom floor was as good a place as any to die. So she curled up on the linoleum,  feeling herself shiver even though she could feel the sweat slowly trickling across her hairline, and fell into more of a stupor than a sleep, clutching her cramping belly. 

 

She woke up to gag and belch again, and the effort to drag herself to lean listlessly over the toilet was so great that she decided to stay sitting upright, propped between the basin and the wall. It was incredibly uncomfortable, and she knew she shouldn’t be resting her cheek against the rim of the toilet seat to use it as a pillow, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care about any of that. She was sweating enough that Daniel’s pyjama shirt was sticking to her in places, but she was still shivering – a fever, then. And, given the fact that she was still alive and not more seriously ill, she’d probably not been poisoned. Unless it was the eggs from yesterday’s brunch that had – 

 

Thinking of food had been a terrible idea. 

 

Time was irrelevant. All that existed was her, feeling like death, in Daniel’s bathroom. 

 

And then, suddenly, the door was being opened and Daniel was crutching inside, using two crutches instead of one. Peggy made a noise of protest that she’d intended to be intelligent words, but he ignored it and... well, mostly  _fell_ onto the floor beside her in a move that made even her fever-hazed brain flare in concern. 

 

“Daniel,” she started, lifting her head off the toilet a little, and then getting stuck because he was pulling a backpack off his shoulders slowly with a deep wince on his face, and one pant leg was empty and pinned neatly upwards, and she’d never stopped to think how much of his leg was prosthetic until she was seeing the evidence casually before her, and she wanted to respond to this offering of vulnerability properly, empathetically, delicately, but she had no freaking idea how to begin to string words together and this had _not_ been how she’d expected to finally be let in and her head was hurting from holding it upright and – 

 

Daniel was holding out a bottle of something to her. She stared at it, perplexed. “Apple cider vinegar in water,” he said, and there was something wrong and rough about his voice. “My mom used to swear it helped with stomach flu.” 

 

She took it, and only then noticed how his hand was shaking, and how much sweat there was along his hairline. “Oh,  _Daniel_ ,” she breathed in dismay. “You  _too_ ?” 

 

He cracked a pathetic attempt at a smile at her, resting his head back against the bathroom wall and closing his eyes with a hum of assent. “Don’t feel too bad,” he murmured. “I may have been the one who gave it to you.” 

 

“Or I to you – I guess we’ll never know.” Peggy forced herself to open the bottle and take a few small sips. It didn’t taste particularly nice, but _her_ mother had sworn by the home cure as well, and Peggy trusted it as much as she trusted anything in her stomach right then. “You should drink some, too.” 

 

Daniel hummed at her again without moving or opening his eyes. “Had some before I came here. My bottle’s in there. With other supplies.” He gestured lazily at the pack. 

 

Guilt churned in Peggy’s insides. Daniel was just as sick as she was, and she’d not only tossed him out of the closest bathroom, but had lain around feeling sorry for herself while he laboured in the kitchen making them home remedies and packing a supply pack.  _And_ then he’d forced himself all the way back to her to deliver them to her. She reached out a hand to him, feeling ashamed and thankful all at once, but before she could touch him his eyes flew open and he made a lunge for the toilet. Peggy leaned back instinctively, and was treated to the sight, sound and smell of Daniel getting sick. 

 

“Sorry,” he panted, when he was done heaving. “I’m so... sorry... Peggy... that...” 

 

“I’ve seen vomit before,” she said, and her words came out tighter and more clipped than she would have liked, because it was no longer guilt churning in her gut. “Daniel, could I ask that you... please sit up?” 

 

She winced in sympathy at the effort it took him, but didn’t manage to even catch his eye before she leaned into the space he’d just left and threw up her few sips of apple cider vinegar water. “Thank you,” she gasped out, when her own dry heaving had passed, before she dragged herself upwards so she could slump against the wall with her eyes closed. 

 

She heard Daniel slap a bit at the side of the toilet until he found the chain to flush, and she couldn’t even find the motivation to open her eyes. Enough time passed that Peggy was beginning to dose when something soft landed in her lap. It was a small blanket, she found when she dragged her eyes open, and she found Daniel laboriously extracting a second one from his pack of wonders. 

 

“Daniel... you’re a wonder,” she moaned, and he lethargically raised his hand in acknowledgement for all of a second. 

 

He seemed to struggle so much getting his blanket out that he didn’t want to bother to unfold it properly, slumping instead in a very uncomfortable-looking position with it still half-bundled in his lap. If she was exhausted and achy from just lying around all morning, then he must have been doubly wiped out. And so, moving slowly and trying not to grumble at the fever aches in her joints or the crick in her back from how she’d been slumping for so long or the cramps in her stomach, she half crawled over to Daniel and began to unfold his blanket and tuck it around him properly. 

 

“Peg – sto – you don’t have to,” he mumbled, peeling his eyes half open but making no actual move to stop her. 

 

“Done already,” she said, as firmly as she could.

 

And then, to her horror, her next words asking if he was alright came out in a belch. A very loud, very wet belch. She felt the shocked mortification wash over her in a chill that momentarily stopped the fever in its tracks, and Daniel took one look at her and began to laugh. His laughter was weak and choked and, a few moments in, there was an unmistakable sound of flatulence. That had definitely not come from her. He went from pale to pink so fast Peggy couldn’t help but howl with laughter, as much as it hurt and as much energy as it took. And he joined her, until both of them were weak, feverish, smelly, hurting piles on the floor, half-sprawled on each other and embarrassed and amused beyond words. 

 

“Owwww,” Peggy moaned, curling tighter around herself. “You shouldn’t have made me laugh.” 

 

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, still a little breathless. “I’m so sorry.” Peggy had already closed her eyes again when a hand hesitantly touched her shoulder. “That looks... uncomfortable.” 

 

“Too much effort to go back to my side of the toilet,” she muttered. 

 

“Then come here,” Daniel said, gently. 

 

They moved in stops and starts, taking the time to rest from the small motions that currently sapped all their strength, but by the time they were done her blanket was mashed into a make-shift pillow, Daniel’s blanket was over them both, and they were curled together in a position that helped Peggy’s painful, cramping stomach and, she hoped, helped him a little with his discomfort, too. Their sweaty foreheads were close enough to almost touch, he smelled as awful as she did, and they were both giving each other half-asleep orders to try and rehydrate a little again, too tired to grab the bottle s for themselves. 

 

Peggy moved first out of sheer determination, forced a few small sips of water into herself barely propped up, and then offered the same bottle to Daniel. They were past the worry of sharing germs. Still, he was mostly asleep, and so she helped him drink, and he let her. As much as she empathised with how lethargic and exhausted and sickly he must be feeling – truly, fully empathised – his lack of protest made her worry enough to place her hand on his forehead, and then on the pulse point of his neck, not caring how much effort it cost for her to hold her arm up for that long. 

 

He murmured something unintelligible at her and grabbed her free hand with his, and Peggy allowed her arm to drop bonelessly to the small space between them. Eyes already heavy, watching Daniel sweat and shiver slightly and sleep, Peggy realised that their attempts of  _going slow_ had been flushed down that toilet. This was quite possibly the lowest she’d ever let anybody see her, and she was quite sure that, barring his injury and recovery, Daniel could say the same about her. And perhaps it was even more poignant; she was extra careful to keep people from seeing her in moments of weakness, because there were always so many eyes waiting to pinpoint the reasons a woman couldn’t be as useful in a man’s world. And Daniel... how much had it cost him to leave the prosthetic off in front of her? To let her see him as weak as the world usually perceived him to be on any given day? 

 

They had blown right past every boundary line, right into the middle of each other’s vulnerability and fear and humiliation. And... and neither of them had balked. Not at this, not at the signs of emotional and physical weakness before this. All she could feel, beneath the sickness and the worry for him, was an intense rush of warmth that, she had to admit to herself after watching him puke and while she could smell his sweat and sickness mingling with her own, was far beyond warm affection. She  _loved_ this man. She loved every bit of his strength and humour and soft heart. She loved that he’d laughed at her when she’d burped and at her laughing at him farting.  After this, there would be no going slow. 

 

And, she thought as she twined her fingers more firmly with his and closed her eyes, she didn’t mind that at all.

 

 


End file.
